Another Bad Email Math Puzzle…

It happened again. I received another email with a number trick that makes the ubiquitous claim, “This will work for everyone!” Sadly, it won’t, but it was kind of cool:

Calculate 39 × (your age) × 259.

The email said, “The result will surprise you.”

It didn’t. I suspected what the value of 39 × 259 would be, so I predicted the result. But if you don’t know the value of that product, then maybe you’ll be surprised.

The trick works well enough if you have a double-digit age. But my friend Ferdinand is 107 years old. His result was 1,080,807, and that just looks like a mess. The results for my six-year-old sons were better, albeit rather unsatisfying.

Ha-rumph. So much for the Internet providing mathematical inspiration.

Here are some similarly uninteresting puzzles that I created:

Calculate 7,373 × (your age) × 137.

Calculate 9,091 × (your age) × 11,111.

Calculate 101 × (your age) × 1,000,100,010,001.

To create more puzzles like this, enter factor(101010…10101) into Wolfram Alpha.

For your centenarian friends, try these:

Calculate 101,101 × (your age) × 9,901.

Calculate 3.3 × (your age) × 33.67.

Let’s not forget the little people whose age is still in the single digits:

Calculate 3 × (your age) × 37.

Calculate 41 × (your age) × 271.

And a math joke (or is it?) about age:

I’ve been good with numbers my whole life. When I turned 2, I realized that my age had doubled in one year. This concerned me… at that rate, I’d be 32 in four more years!

About MJ4MF

The Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks blog is an online extension to the book Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks. The blog contains jokes submitted by readers, new jokes discovered by the author, details about speaking appearances and workshops, and other random bits of information that might be interesting to the strange folks who like math jokes.